Mail for these domains is being routed through mx.yandex.ru in Russia.

These job offers are completely bogus and could land you in serious trouble with the police. If you have an example email using one of these domains, please consider sharing it in the Comments. Thanks!

Friday, 29 July 2011

Claiming to come from Iran, but actually originating from 115.249.131.254 in India, this allegedly Iranian scam is just a new twist on the Nigerian 419 scams that we are all familiar with.. in other words, this is an advanced fee fraud.

My name is Ghohestani Hananehsadat Seyedhemed; I was born in Mashad, Iran on 05th March 1991 to Mr and Mrs G. Seyedhemed, who dead in the January 2011 plane crash in Iran that killed more than 80 people including my Father, Mother and younger brother Ali.
http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/news/nearly-80-killed-in-iran-plane-crash/186668

My father was a retired nuclear scientist and has worked in different project in Iran and outside Iran but lately there was a spate of serial killings of Iranian nuclear scientist and my father knew about it and was making arrangement for our trip and relocation to a foreign country and me and my brother was issued international passport on 15th July 2010 in preparation for our relocation and my father also made a deposit in a foreign bank amounting to $24,500,000USD(Twenty Four Million Five Hundred United States Dollars) for the settling in another country.

Since my father died i have been trying to get the funds because i have the deposit documents and contact of his Lawyer who i have spoken with just after my fathers death but as a single lady in Iran you just cannot do anything on your own, you are not allowed to travel out of Iran and moreover with no access to telephone or constant internet. My father’s family took all that my father had here in Iran and forced me into marrying my father’s Friend when i disagreed initially they beat me and said as a single girl i cannot stay alone so i had no choice than to marry him. My life is really miserable because i am not allowed to go out, have visitors or use the phone.I have lost my pride as a woman. Luckily for me, my husband has a daughter my age and she allows me use her computer when she is around actually not knowing what i do here.

Please i am contacting you in the Name of Almighty Allah who i serve and who my family serve to help me in getting these funds. All you need to do is stand as my family member and be next of Kin because the Lawyer told me then to suggest anybody who can stand as the next of kin and he will prepare necessary document but i cannot bring anyone from my father’s family since all they want is to claim my father’s property.

I will send you the deposit certificate and the Lawyers contact so that you can make urgent contact with him. I will also send you my ID or passport for Identification if you need that. You may wonder why i am contacting you, a complete stranger but i trust you more than my father’s brothers who has done no good but harm to me and i know that you will not disappoint me too because i have gone through nights of prayers just to locate a reliable person who can help me out of this problem.

I will need you to reply me with your details as follows to (iranianhananehsadat@gawab.com)

As soon as the money is transferred to you. We shall share the total amount 60% for me and 30% for you and 10% for any expenses incurred during this transaction. I want to use my share to get out of Iran and invest in a foreign Country. I hope to hear from you as soon as possible and may Allah bless you and your family.

Wednesday, 27 July 2011

These domains are being used to advertise fake jobs and appear to be targeting Spanish and Portuguese speakers. They form part of this long-running series of domains associated with fake job offers.

chile-hh.com
cv-trabalho.com
espana-hh.com
worldjoblists.com

The jobs being offered are typically money laundering (lavado de dinero / lavagem de dinheiro) which are highly illegal. It is possible that some other jobs offered may be "back office" functions, including translation into local languages.

Tuesday, 26 July 2011

paypal.de is pretty obviously a legitimate PayPal domain, registered to eBay and hosted on 66.211.168.83 in eBay's address space. However, Phishtank thinks that it is a phish.. well, OK, false positives happen.. but the problem here is that it has been manually verified as a phish which really does show a weakness in the Phishtank verification system. It's not the first time it has happened.

So, if you are in Germany and find that paypal.de is blocked, then this is the reason why.

Saturday, 23 July 2011

Assuming that this follows the standard pattern of dozens of other domains, then these will be too-good-to-be-true job offers that appear to have been emailed "from" yourself. The jobs on offer will actually be money laundering or some other criminal activity.

The domain was registered on 23th July, to a fake registrant "Ricardo Lopez", allegedly from Estonia. Avoid at all costs.

Friday, 22 July 2011

I'm feeling quite sweary this week, so here's a stupid email from a market research company who are pretending not to be doing it for Sky (I know it's for Sky because it uses an email address only used to sign up to Sky). It's b*llocks basically.

A well-known broadband provider has commissioned us here at Tpoll, an independent market research agency, to talk to people about their opinions and experiences with their TV and broadband providers.

The broadband provider in question is very keen to properly understand their customers’ needs, how well the products and services they offer are meeting their needs, and how they compare to other providers. They have asked Tpoll to investigate and we have invited you to take part in an online survey to share your thoughts and opinions.

This survey is organised and run under the rules of the Market Research Society. All responses will be strictly confidential and results will only be looked at on an aggregated level so please be as honest as you can with your answers.

Your answers will be very much appreciated and will be extremely valuable in shaping the products and services the provider offers.

Please click on the link below to start the survey - it should take 10 to 15 minutes to complete.

Click here to begin

Many Thanks,

Elizabeth Green

Tpoll Market Intelligence

So.. you want me to spend 15 minutes doing market research for Sky - a company that I don't use for broadband - just to help them shape their business? I did very much enjoy telling them that I don't have a TV or broadband access. Maybe this will screw up their survey.

Is this spam? It's hard to tell. I have a pre-existing relationship with Sky, but I'm pretty sure I didn't opt-in for this. It would be much more honest if Sky just admitted that they were behind it. Although perhaps their relationship with Rupert Murdoch's empire might be driving them to keep it quiet..

Thursday, 21 July 2011

If you've never heard of Etisalat then you are probably lucky. Etisalat is the monopoly telecoms provider in the UAE, and like all monopoly providers it is basically crap.

Why am I bothered? Well, after receiving this same spam 4386 times with no sign of a let-up, then I thought it might be nice if Etisalat educated their customer. Unfortunately, Etisalat's abuse mailbox doesn't work, presumably because it is packed full of complaints and nobody from Etisalat can manage to shift their fat sweaty arses enough to look at it.

Now, not getting a response to abuse complaints is pretty typical and not really worth commenting on. However, I was eventually able to get a response from customer support. And it looked promising!

Thank you for contacting Etisalat Customer Care Center.

Further to your email, please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience happened. We had escalated the issue to the concerned department and will update you soon after we receive a reply. Kindly bear with us for the delay. reference number 388135

Once again we thank you for contacting us and looking forward to serving you in the future. For any further clarification please contact Etisalat Customer Care Center.

Great.. I thought. Better late than never. So I waited.. and the next reply was basically a "fuck you" from Etisalat:

Thank you for contacting Etisalat Customer Care Center.
Kindly enable sufficient anti spam settings or add filters in your email to overcome the situation.
Once again we thank you for contacting us and looking forward to serving you in the future. For any further clarification please contact Etisalat Customer Care Center.

Wait.. what? The solution to Etisalat allowing customers to spam is.. basically to block email from Etisalat? So basically it is just too much effort for Etisalat to actually do anything. Maybe the airconditioning is broken in the Etisalat support offices and their arses are just too fat and sweaty today..

Anyway, 86.96.226.150 is the culprit to block but if you follow Etisala's own recommendations then block email coming in from 86.96.226.0 - 86.96.239.255 (86.96.224.0/20) just to be on the safe side.

Just a single fake job domain today, world-chilecv.com is an addition to this long-running series of so-called job offers which actually turn out to be money laundering or some other criminal activity.

The domain in question was registered just yesterday to the no-doubt fake reigstrant:

Hello.
Don't miss unique employment opportunity.
The company is seeking for enthusiastic representative in United Kingdom to help us spread out our activity in the Europe area.
easy training available.
Superb income potential.

At first glance it looks like a standard money mule spam, but there are two odd things. One is the "Subject" line which has the actual name of the spam victim. Not their email address, their real name.. more of this in a minute. The other odd thing is that the "From" address appears to be valid, and the email really has originated from Hotmail, presumably in some sort of auto-generated spamming account.

The inclusion of the recipient's name in the subject is the odd thing. In this case, I had a bunch of largely unrelated users in different countries with very similar email messages. So where had the names come from? Well, there were a couple of anomalies which gave a clue.. in two cases the "Subject" name was a family member, and not the actual recipient.

This narrowed down the possibilities, and it became apparent that the users had registered for something in the name of a family member, but using their own email account. And in one case that tied directly to a company which was a victim of the Epsilon data breach.

Looking over the other spam recipients, the majority were on the mailing list of Hilton Honors, Marriott Rewards, Marks and Spencer, Capital One or other Epsilon customers. Some didn't fit the pattern, but were connected with Pixmania, Plentyoffish.com and Play.com which were all hacked at about the same time. So perhaps the spammer's list is made up of data from more than one source.

Do I know for sure that this is connected with the Epsilon breach? No. But the inclusion of the family member's names indicates that they were harvested externally, the majority of users could be shown to have a connection to companies involved in the Epsilon breach, and the small number who couldn't seemed to be users of other breached companies.

This spam was very crude in its actual pitch. But I'm guessing that this will be the first of many more targeted spam/scam emails using this stolen data.

Friday, 15 July 2011

Christwire.org is a satirical site about religion, not a million miles away from The Onion in terms of content. It's quite a popular site in the US.

Unfortunately, the site has been hacked and the .htaccess file has been altered. Visitors Googling from "Christwire" (I suggest that you don't try this!) get redirected to a URL at sokoloperkovuske.com/in.php?pp=138 .. but if you visit the site directly, then you don't see anything. This type of trickery is quite common as it make it harder for the site owner to detect the problem.

Visitors are then redirected to a fake anti-virus site at www2.bestaholder.co.cc which is multihomed on 112.175.243.24, 112.175.243.21, 112.175.243.22 and 112.175.243.23 in Korea. Those servers have a lot of .co.cc sites.. it's worth blocking access to ALL .co.cc sites if you can.

Thursday, 14 July 2011

Almost identical in every way to this injection attack, several Dreamhost sites have been compromised with a page called yahlink.php (it was yahoolink.php before), which is being spammed out through compromised AOL accounts.

It isn't just Dreamhost hosted sites that are being spammed out in this way, but it does appear that well over half the sites are on Dreamhost. It looks like some GoDaddy customers might have been hit too.

In this case, the spammed link directs to krokodilius8.com/gosem11.php which is hosted on 78.129.132.26 which appears to be iomart Hosting Ltd in the UK. All the sites on that server appear to have have fake registrant details, so you can assume that they are bogus:

Users are then directed to another host in Romania, 188.229.89.230 which belongs to Netserv Consult SRL. It is my opinion that there is nothing of value in the entire 188.229.0.0/17 range and you can safely block access to the entire lot.

The final step is to a host called drugstorehealthrisks.net hosted on 90.182.175.232 which looks like a broadband connection in the Czech Republic. The site isn't loading for me, but I guess it's just pharma spam. These other sites are hosted on the same server:

Dreamhost have been informed of the issue but don't appear to have done anything to secure their users. Blocking Dreamhost IPs might be something worth considering depending on what kind of shop you run. I have spotted malicious activity in the following IP ranges:

67.205.0.0/18
69.163.128.0/17
75.119.192.0/19208.97.128.0/18

..although blocking access to the Romanian 188.229.0.0/17 block would also pretty much acheive the same thing without blocking access to any legitimate sites that might be on Dreamhost.

Tuesday, 12 July 2011

This is a rather new phishing site, pretending to be a tax refund from the UK's HMRC agency pointing to the domain confirm-hmrc.com (subdomains www.confirm-hmrc.com and onlineservice.confirm-hmrc.com).

Although the phish looks convincing, the HMRC don't do tax refunds in this way. Usually they will just transfer the money to your bank account or alternatively send you a cheque. Furthermore, in my experience the HMRC only communicate by post and not electronic mail.

The site hosted on 218.108.75.53 in China. The same server also has the fraudulent domains account-update-westernunion.com, account-westernunion.com and accounts-westernunion.com. The domain registration details are fake:

Friday, 8 July 2011

The domain hotmailbox.com often comes up when looking at malicious domains, it's a domain used to provide a bulletproof email address for domain registration. The registrar for hotmailbox.com is the scammer's favourite, BIZCN which probably explains why it has lingered for so long.

There are several hundred domains registered through email accounts at hotmailbox.com, all of them are bogus and follow a similar pattern with bogus US addresses. Most of the domains with active websites are hosted in Romania, in netblocks that have a known bad reputation.

You can download a list of domains, IPs and MyWOT ratings for at least some of these domains here [CSV], or if you just want a plain list then keep scrolling down.

Because the hotmailbox.com domains are all in bad blocks or dedicated servers, then it is possible to block access to these IP ranges or individual boxes to prevent infection. I would recommend blocking the following:

Not every site in those ranges is part of this group, and indeed there may be a few legitimate sites, but you are much more likely to come into contact with a malware site on these IP addresses than a real one, so treat them as "high risk".

If you have any examples of domains using hotmailbox.com that are not listed, then please consider adding them to the Comments.

Tuesday, 5 July 2011

I don't normally post twice on one spammer, but the idiots at Sapphire Town Real Estate seem to have hit new levels of stupidity with this spam that they have now sent 283 times, apparently about 1% into a dictionary attack (so I can expect to see it 28,000 more times!)

If they are this stupid when it comes to doing business then I would advise giving them a wide berth.

Monday, 4 July 2011

This spam for labour camps was so important to the sender that they sent it 300 times (and counting). Just add slaves, I guess. And in jolly Comic Sans too! Originating IP is 86.96.226.150 in the UAE, all attempts at contacting their abuse department bounce. Classy.

If you have any questions or concerns, please email us directly stre@eim.aeOr call 050-3479984///04-2576603This E-mail has been sent to you as a person interested in the information enclosed. If you have received this e-mail in error please notify the originator of the Email If you want your Email to be removed PLEASE reply to info@sapphiretown.comto ''Remove from list''. We sincerely apologize for the possible inconvenience.